I've been trying valiantly to have HSB-431 up and running on the kids' game/multimedia computer these holidays, but have been massively thwarted by hardware configurations (e.g., SD-card home drive master and PATA drive in a SuperRack enslaved for movies; 100mb zip drive hooked up as a secondary slave), or RAM stick self-destructions, or fschk shennanighans with FireFox breakdowns - but mostly the kiddie's desire to run the ShockwaveFlash game "Bloons Tower Defence 4" or even "Mr Bean's Trouble at the Hair Salon". Kabloohey goes the computer. This behaviour was universal to all flavours of Puppy that I tried - HSB itself was definitely not at fault. Most regrettably, the breakages experienced with FireFox/SeaMonkey/Flash were also similar with OO4Kids 1.1 - thankyou ASRI éducation - but the kids really enjoyed what they saw and experimented with before breakage occurred.

To get Shockwave Flash operational (either within a browser or standalone player - v10.0.5 and later versions - even earlier Flash9 pets) I even tried to install Icewm and XFCE in HSB to sidestep issues with Flash and JWM reported elsewhere, but to no avail. I even attempted running the games under Wine, but I couldn't even get your Wine pet going in HSB-412 properly. Hardware issues yes - but I had also completely forgotten about using the Cabextract pet with technosaur's winetricks - that's the trouble with a standalone (no internet) computer - you quickly find yourself in the dark about the little problems that crop up with installation hijinks.

There isn't much in the way of educational Flash games anyway at present, unless you count downloads from this site:
http://www.theproblemsite.com/flash_games.asp. It seems however that any SWF beasties should be let well enough alone in Puppy, for the time being.

Now my kids are well within the demographic that HSB is aimed squarely at, although we have avoided using/installing Childsplay as it is "for babies". Thanks for including that as an optional download SFS. AJ's hasn't really hit the spot with my kids, but Fatty Bear will forever be a perennial favourite.
My dastardly plan is to get my son - who is just getting into the maps and Machiavelli stage, at the end of Year 2 - interested in "Lords of Midnight". Explanations and downloads of various remakes available here -

I'm not even going to mention that other classic, Elite, which has been made into the open-source "OOlite" http://www.oolite.org/about. Perhaps it's a bit old for my kids at the moment, though I'm sure that the deb version would run in Lupu with minimum hassle. I would see the games listed above as decent bridges for children older than the gCompris demographic . Ecomoney included a version with his c64 emulator way back in his v.0.72 pupplet (I think), but I haven't seen it discussed lately for Puppy Linux. I guess I'm searching for games that are cognitively challenging and not first-person-shooter, and I reckon that LOM and OOlite fit the bill, as well as being community-based.

I found that installing SilverPuppy's recovery-after-improper shutdown in 412 and 431 worked a blimmin treat. would you consider implementing that as standard in future Puppy4 HSB releases? I realize that the self-repair ability is standard now in Puppy5. For improving file system stability I could not for the life of me get HSB-431 full-installed on a SD-drive formatted with Ext3. Worked with HSB-412 (um. Initially). Kernel issue there perhaps? Do you mention somewhere that Ext2 is best for HSB?

I'd really like to see an easy-to use countdown timer installed in HSB. Time limits between kids for various games to reduce the opportunities for sibling conflict etc. NumLock=on as standard would also be a real plus - don't know how many times the keypad has caused confusion and delay by not behaving as advertised.

Multimedia options are a plus I think with HSB - I have used ttuuxx's VLC 0.8.6f very reliably in HSB of all flavours - particularly handy as it automatically links to the DVD player without the need to type "//mnt/hdc" anymore in the offending dialogue every time a disc needs to be changed. Perhaps you could mention the expandability of HSB for multimedia roles in your up-and-coming website.

With your intended website, please could you remember to post instructions on un-pinning the desktop to remove any icons that aren't necessary, and various other keyboard short-cuts. How to implement the Puppy Event Manager to have drive icons appear when USB sticks etc would be helpful - although I realise that this is intentionally circumvented for data protection from mischievous mousy fingers. Would really be helpful to highlight the password for the "Recycle This" option you and ecomoney have been working on.

For your one-click Recycling plans, could you incorporate Memtest or something similar to be run from the desktop environment? A little suite of diagnostic software or tips on how to do this from within Puppy would be helpful. If they exist - but I haven't found them yet.

What about considering wBar rather than a icon-laden desktop in future releases/options?

While waiting for new RAM and perhaps a new CPU to arrive for the kid's computer, I'll probably be dreaming of ways of expanding HSB on a no-internet-access computer with java, Wine, XFCE... What about I pre-load something like Bruno (4.31) on a fresh ext2-formatted drive, then Very Cleverly over-install HSB-431 as an upgrade? Best of both worlds, or a World of Pain?
The Silly Season Approacheth...

Cheers!

PS Don't rush on replying to these observations - I'll be taking similar ideas to Martin and his 301-revamped PuppyTLC that will be arriving officially any................ second............................... now . It will cover a different hardware demographic http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy//viewtopic.php?t=62363
PPS Kids computer - ASROCK K7S41gx, Duron 1800+ CPU, 512Kb PC2100 DDR. SuperRack IDE drive for movie database is now a USB caddy._________________Toowoomba Linux Community
http://groups.google.com/group/toowoombalinuxLast edited by Puppyt on Wed 15 Dec 2010, 22:37; edited 2 times in total

I think it is set to boot off the NTSF partition, can I just replace the files with the new HSB 431, and add more sfs files... ?

Or should I do a fresh install... can someone just give me a short list of the install process?

Béèm wrote:

For this you can download the new iso and mount it while in the old version and then copy the new files over the old ones.
Best is to copy the pup_save.2fs as it will be upgrade on the next boot. So you can revert to that copy in case something went wrong.

KinderTux is an installable live system based on Mandriva Linux 2010. It's designed for kids from 3 to 12 years and contains lots of educational games and "just for fun" games. An internet browser is installed already showing lots of links to kid's sites, mostly German but some also in English. Also installed is a parent control system to protect the kids.

A recent visitor to sidder's threads to HSB 4.12 and 4.31 found that all the links were dead. I've located in my archives all (most?) the iso's that sidders made for the Puppy4 series, and I've posted them on a mydrive account:
1) Go to http://www.mydrive.ch
2) Sign on with username "puppyt" and password "puppylinux"
3) The files are located in the HSB>ISOs directory

My intention is to post any pets or sfs' that sidders made for his creations also at this location. Please post/PM/flame for any particular requests and I can accelerate their recovery. (Mountains of CD archives, poor internet service from home etc etc). Let me know if MD5's are required too, or you find errors in the uploads.
My real interest has been to have a permanent repository for "Puppy 4 Kids" -type puplets: EduPup, HSB, GamesPup216 - even Growler, Hurt-Me-Plenty and sc0ttman's Arcade pups for the kids-at-heart. Hoping that any mirror men reading this might agree..._________________Toowoomba Linux Community
http://groups.google.com/group/toowoombalinux

On each pc re-boot an extra icon for Etoys & Childsplay is created on the desktop (the icons are created on top of one another).

I have installed HanSamBen on two pc's, both have this problem; otherwise runs great.

At a guess this icon creation is in a start-up script somewhere, anyone know what I need to change?

Sorry my english:
After first install of these games at desktop I deleted all files that describes these games icons in /Startup folder and after save and reboot, it helped!!!! No more extra same icons!

Great thing this HanSamBen 431 and Puppy linux. Thanks from my children!!!!

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